1: The Arrival of Charlie Red Star
Once you see the thing, you know it. When you see this thing once, you never forget it. Just the way — the heartbeat of the thing. It’s a luminous light. You’d like to see through it, but you can’t.
— Art Stagg, Resident of Carman, Manitoba

Except for some of the world’s best wheat, the Winnipeg Jets hockey team, and being among the coldest regions in the world, the city of Winnipeg, and the town of Carman 35 miles southwest have been famous for very little. It was therefore unusual when, in February 1975, Manitoba suddenly become the focus of a series of almost nightly UFO sightings that lasted nearly two years. During that time, the province was on the map as the place where aliens came to visit.
Manitoba, however, wasn’t totally unfamiliar to UFO phenomena. There had been a flap of sightings in 1967 that included one of the most famous UFO cases ever — that of Stefan Michalak, the Polish-born prospector who came in contact with a UFO that had landed outside Falcon Lake.
The Michalak case occurred on May 20, 1967, about 40 miles north of the U.S. border on the edge of Whiteshell Provincial Park. The area where the event took place is desolate, hilly, rocky, and treed.
Michalak was prospecting for quartz veins associated with silver deposits when the incident happened. Just after noon he heard the cack¬ling of geese, sounding as if they had been disturbed. Looking up, he spotted “two cigar-shaped objects with ‘bumps’ on them.” They were descending from high above him.
One of the two objects landed on a large, flat rock about 160 feet away. The other object “hovered for a short while, then departed as well, flying into the west, where it disappeared behind the clouds.”
Shortly after the approximately 40-by-10-foot craft landed, Michalak noticed that a two-by-three-foot door had opened on the side of the craft. He could see light inside the door “and heard two humanlike voices, one with a higher pitch than the other.”
Believing the object to be an experimental American aircraft, Michalak walked up to the vessel and called out, offering help. When he didn’t get a reply, he tried other languages he knew but got no answer in Russian, German, Italian, French, Ukrainian, and then once again in English.
Still not receiving a response, Michalak walked up to the craft and stuck his head inside where he saw “a maze of lights on what appeared to be a panel, and beams of light in horizontal and diagonal patterns. There was also a cluster of lights flashing in a random sequence ‘like on a computer.’” Then, as he moved back, “three panels slid over the opening, sealing it ‘like a camera shutter.’”
At that point Michalak touched the side of the craft and noticed no joints or welds. It took only seconds to realize that his rubber glove had melted.
Next, the vessel began to lift off. As it rose, it started to spin, and as it did, a six-by-nine-inch grid like a vent shot out a blast of hot air against his chest as it rotated by him. The hot air ignited his clothes, prompting Michalak to tear them off as the craft flew away.
Once he had removed his burning clothes, he had a new problem. He had become very sick and was vomiting, and struggled to get back through the rugged terrain to the Trans-Canada Highway.
After returning to his home in Winnipeg, he made many hospital visits for his burns and other physiological effects. The case was investigated by several government and UFO organizations, became one of the most investigated UFO cases ever, and has been the subject of numerous articles and documentaries.
The 1975 Manitoba UFO flap was the second big UFO event in the province. When the sightings first began, the phenomena went unstudied for quite a while before people started to visit Carman and record the events. Most media and UFO investigators didn’t really get involved until May 1975 after the nightly flybys had been occurring for a couple of months.
My personal involvement in the flap was similar to that of the media. I had heard reports of sightings in the Carman area, but like most people, I watched with curiosity from afar.
At that time in my life I was a member of a group of young men in their early twenties who spent most of their free-time hours driving around Winnipeg doing not much of anything. None of us had an inter-est in UFOs. No one was a science fiction buff, and none of us had any scientific leanings. Our interests were focused on football, baseball, and playing cards. My only related activity was the field of parapsychology, particularly the stories surrounding the psychic Edgar Cayce, and in research related to the study of death and dying.
The only UFO story I knew that was connected to my interest in para¬psychology came from research I had done into the life and “readings” of the “sleeping prophet” Edgar Cayce. It was an account that still pops into my mind when people talk about the possible date for UFO disclo¬sure. In a book about Cayce, author Jess Stearn describes a strange dream Cayce had about what appeared to be a UFO:

As happened so often in his life, a significant dream came during a great emotional crisis. Cayce had been arrested in Detroit for “practicing medicine without a license,” and had been subjected to the ignominy of public trial as a charlatan.
On the train back to Virginia Beach, he had one of his most singular dreams. He had been born again in 2100 A.D. in Nebraska.
“The sea,” he recalled, “apparently covered all the western parts of the country, as the city where I lived was on the coast. The family name was a strange one. At an early age, as a child, I declared myself to be Edgar Cayce who had lived two hundred years before. Scientists, men with long beards, little hair and thick glasses, were called in to observe me.
“They decided to visit places where I said that I had been born, lived and worked in Kentucky, Alabama, New York, Michigan and Virginia. Taking me with them the group of scien¬tists visited these places in a long, cigar-shaped metal flying ship which moved at high speed.”

It was partly these words spoken years before the initial Kenneth Arnold UFO sighting in June 1947 that convinced me UFO phenomena were real, and that by the year 2100 humans would possess its technology. I was now poised to become involved.
In May 1975, the media had been reporting since March that sightings were being made in Carman almost every night. I realized there was a chance I might see the UFO making such a stir as reported in local newspapers. It was a rare opportunity comparable to being given the opportunity to see Elvis Presley perform live, or to attend a royal wedding.
I suggested to my friends that instead of driving around the streets of Winnipeg aimlessly, we should head for Carman to see what every¬one was reporting. The decision was made to go, but nothing happened until more than two weeks after CKY-TV in Winnipeg filmed the object. Three of us left late one evening to join hundreds of people crowding the roads around Carman, waiting for a flyby of the UFO residents were calling Charlie Red Star.
Like the general population, I had the impression UFO sightings were a random event that occurred to people who weren’t usually planning to see anything. Prominent researchers in the UFO community had clearly stated that one couldn’t isolate the UFO phenomena. UFOs, it was concluded, couldn’t be studied in a laboratory. They were random events among a scattering of civilization in the wrong (right) place at the wrong (right) time.
Because I also believed UFOs found you and not the reverse, I had grave doubts we would actually spot anything when we arrived in Carman. However, there was nothing better to do that night, so at 10:30 p.m. on May 29, 1975, we headed off to see a flying saucer or whatever the hell everyone was making so much noise about.
In Carman during April, May, and June 1975, it seemed that many people had abandoned their television sets to catch a glimpse of Charlie Red Star. Numerous cars were parked on the roads outside town.
Upon arriving in Carman, we drove around looking for the UFO. My friends and I had no idea what to search for. We knew many people had seen the object at the local airport known as Friendship Field, but we couldn’t find it because it was dark and the runway lights were off. Like typical men, we didn’t bother to stop anyone in town to get directions.
Then we saw what turned out to be Venus setting in the west. It appeared brighter and brighter as it neared the horizon. At the time we didn’t know exactly what it was but realized it had to be a planet or star because it wasn’t moving except in relation to the other planetary objects. We thought that maybe this was what everyone was talking about. If it was the reported object, though, it wasn’t very impressive.
Doug Wheeler, my long-time friend and the driver that night, finally put an end to the hunt. “We’ll drive back into town one more time,” he said. “If we don’t see anything, we’ll go home.” The rest of us quickly agreed. The whole episode seemed a total waste of time.
We were about two miles east of Carman when Doug made the final turn back into town. Then it happened. About a mile from Carman every¬one saw it. “There it is!” one of my friends yelled. It was moving from left to right, coming from the south and crossing the road in front of the car.
As I have explained literally hundreds of times since in lectures and seminars, there was no question that what we were now gazing at was indeed Charlie Red Star as described in media reports. The red pulsing and bouncing object was quite low. It flew in front of us about a half mile down the road and was unlike anything we had seen before.
The mood in the car turned from silent pessimism to one in which the home team had just scored the winning touchdown.
What is important to remember is that there was no belief involved. There was no analysis of what we were seeing. No one asked, “Is that what everyone’s reporting?” We all knew UFOs were real and we were looking at one. Instantly, we left behind the percentage of people who had never seen a UFO and therefore could only choose to believe or disbelieve the existence of unexplainable UFOs through the accounts of others.